The Golden Ratio

by Cole McCade

  With a disdainful sound in the back of her throat, Wellington leaned on the long wet bar running the length of the room, crossing her pointed stiletto heels. “Huang,” she bit off. “Why am I even here?”

  “Because the only reason I’m letting you keep mucking up the works is because I have a use for you,” he answered. “You have connections. I need them.”

  She lifted her chin, looking down her rather pointed noise. “What’s in it for me?”

  Breathe in.

  Breathe out.

  Don’t murder her.

  He was trying to get out of that.

  Not leave another trail of bodies in his wake, no matter where he went.

  And he felt as though Sade were watching him especially close, as he reined himself in and forced his anger down underneath a layer of steel.

  Calm.

  But just because he was calm didn’t mean he could let Wellington get ideas about who called the shots here.

  “What’s in it for you,” he answered, choosing every word carefully, “is that I don’t cut you off completely and leave you floundering on your own with no protection.” He met her gaze without flinching. She thought she was hard; she didn’t know what hard was. “You only think you’re a shark. I cut you loose…and you’re nothing but chum in the water. And everyone on the streets you want to own? Has a lot of fucking teeth.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She clenched her jaw, and he thought she just might get confrontational, from the spark in her gaze, the red flush in her cheeks.

  But she huffed, looking away. Backing down, but with her shoulders stiff and her head held high. Playing, he thought. Playing at being too good for this so she wouldn’t lose face.

  He’d let her have that.

  Even when she snarled, “Should I thank you for your gracious protection?”

  Enough.

  Time to get this fiasco over with.

  “You should sit down and listen,” he ordered, folding his arms over his chest. “Because I want out. And if you help me get what I want…” He could see her catching on before he even said it, her gaze flying back to his, eyes widening. “…the keys to the kingdom are yours, Lillienne Wellington. As long as you’re willing to work for it.”

  C

  MALCOLM DIDN’T KNOW HOW SEONG-JAE could sleep.

  Malcolm had spent the entire flight awake, staring blankly out the window and watching the skim and scud of the clouds, letting the strange patterns they formed distract him and soothe his mind.

  Until sooner or later those patterns began to take shapes he didn’t want to see.

  Limbs. Organs. Distorted faces, cut apart in seams of skin and rearranged until the features made some grotesque imitation of a symmetrical doll.

  And he had to look away, instead turning his head to watch the quietly sleeping weight of the man propped against his shoulder.

  It wasn’t an easy sleep. Malcolm could tell that much, when Seong-Jae’s brows were tight-knitted lines making dark arches against pale golden skin; when his lips were parted and moving restlessly, as if he spoke to someone in his sleep.

  Malcolm wondered who.

  What figment of Seong-Jae’s nightmare past was haunting his sleep, compelling him to command the apparition from his dreams.

  He wondered, too, if this was normal for Seong-Jae.

  If this was taking him back to years of jetting around the country, cases taking him from one crime scene to another, stealing sleep when he could on flights, in the back of cars, in hotel rooms.

  When the haunting things he faced would let him sleep at all.

  But as the plane began to shudder with the shifts in engine speed and wing adjustments that heralded arrival at their destination, Seong-Jae moved restlessly against Malcolm’s shoulder.

  But he didn’t wake fully until the in-flight intercom pinged, the Fasten Seatbelt signs lighting up, the pilot’s voice piping over the cabin with that typical forced, jovial calm on announcing descent and landing at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Seong-Jae made a soft, irritable sound, shaking his head against Malcolm’s shoulder with a sleepy snort, before blinking blearily and opening one eye.

  Before promptly muttering, “…fuck.”

  “Just about,” Malcolm answered, smiling faintly. “Hey.”

  “Mm.” Seong-Jae yawned, pushing himself up, the pressure of his warmth lifting off Malcolm’s shoulder to leave it a little numb and tingly. Seong-Jae scrubbed the heel of his palm against his eye, then turned that drowsy, darkened gaze on Malcolm, eyeing him. “Were you watching me sleep?”

  “Maybe.”

  Seong-Jae grimaced. “You do that quite often.”

  Malcolm chuckled. “You’re pretty in your sleep.”

  That earned him the filthiest possible look—quite a feat when Seong-Jae’s face as creased with sleep, his eyes still heavy-lidded and half-closed. “Do not be…what is the word I want?”

  “Romantic?” Malcolm offered.

  “Creepy,” Seong-Jae retorted flatly, before pointedly ignoring Malcolm as he fished his seatbelt from between the seats and fastened it over his hips.

  Malcolm only chuckled, buckling his own seatbelt and then bracing himself against the seat for the inevitable pressure of descent.

  They said nothing else as the flight landed, even if it felt like there were a million tensions waiting between them.

  Or maybe that was Malcolm’s ears trying to pop, his brain feeling like it was swelling in his skull.

  But there was definitely something off about Seong-Jae, as they gathered their carry-ons and made their way toward the exit; Malcolm scanned the crowd for Aanga Joshi, but he was nowhere in sight.

  While Seong-Jae kept his gaze trained straight ahead, his expression even more blank than usual; Seong-Jae was a master of subtle micro-expressions, and normally that slight hint of a cool, dead-set scowl was enough to warn people to keep their distance and not edge a toe across his boundaries.

  This waxy, blank neutrality…

  Yeah.

  Something was definitely wrong.

  Malcolm just hoped they weren’t about to start this again.

  Secrets, obfuscations, deliberate deflections, outright lies, all because Seong-Jae felt like he had to carry everything on his own.

  Malcolm wanted to think he wasn’t the sort of person who could lose trust in the person he loved because of one mistake.

  But that didn’t change that he was…wary.

  Uncertain.

  And he didn’t know if he could take it again, if Seong-Jae shut him out and locked up inside his own head while Malcolm could do nothing but wait helplessly and hope his omr-an would come back to him, sooner or later.

  They didn’t find Joshi until they’d found their way through the terminal and out to the pickup area. Joshi leaned against a slick black SUV with blacked-out windows, his suitcase propped against his calf and his gaze trained on his watch.

  As they emerged, he looked up, arching one sharp brow. “It took you long enough.”

  “You did not,” Seong-Jae pointed out coolly, “specify a meet point.”

  “I’d think you hadn’t forgotten routine, but if someone hadn’t sulked back to coach we wouldn’t have had to specify a meet point.” He pulled the back door of the SUV open, then, and held it for them with an exaggerated bow. “After you, gentlemen.”

  Malcolm chose to ignore that he had been rather specifically left out of that scenario, and just stepped forward to heft himself into the back seat of the SUV, ducking down to fit his carry-on between his feet.

  Deliberate move.

  He wanted Seong-Jae seated between him and Joshi, or he might not be able to keep his teeth to himself.

  Seong-Jae slid in after him, pausing to push his rolling suitcase over the seat back and into the rear storage area. Joshi did the same, before climbing in, slamming the door closed, and rapping on the blacked out divider completely walling off the driver’s seat from the back.

  The SUV pulled
out smoothly. Malcolm settled to lean against the car door, propping his elbow on the window, and flicked Seong-Jae’s thigh with his fingers.

  “Hey,” he murmured. “Relax.”

  Seong-Jae—who sat rigid, holding himself in a stiff, doll-like pose, staring straight ahead—only let out a soft “Tch” sound.

  But he leaned subtly closer to Malcolm.

  And that was enough.

  Joshi pinched the creases in his slacks, letting out a long sigh through his nostrils. “So I assume you reviewed prior case files on the flight?” he said into the thick silence. “We’ll check into our hotel later, and head straight to the crime scene for now. It’s been waiting long enough.”

  Malcolm glanced at him past Seong-Jae. “How long since it was called in?”

  “Roughly forty-four hours now, counting our flight time. We’re unclear on the exact timeline of the incident, but we’ll be able to clear that up on-site.”

  “Incident,” Malcolm prompted.

  “Apparently there was a prison break, and that was how the crime scene was discovered,” Joshi said. “One of the prison guards managed to trigger the alarm during the escape attempt, but by the time armed response arrived the riot had been contained, several inmates had escaped, and the damage had been done. During containment, the guards stumbled on multiple murder sites and several bodies. Once the local police contacted the local state FBI installation, one of our analysts recognized the pattern immediately and contacted me, and I immediately took the liberty of requesting special dispensation for Seong-Jae to join us on the case.”

  “How kind of you,” Seong-Jae said, words straining out through his teeth. “At almost two days after death, the crime scene is already of less use to us.”

  “Contrary to popular belief, the FBI doesn’t have secret teleporters, so…” Joshi spread his hands. “We did the best we could. I thought if I’d called to request you, you would have said no.”

  A tic twitched in Seong-Jae’s cheek. “You would be right.”

  This…was not going well.

  Malcolm shifted to let his hand fall between them, but kept his curled knuckles pressed against Seong-Jae’s thigh. Hoping to provide some distraction, some grounding, even as he steered them back on track by asking, “Where are we going, at this moment?”

  “An Arizona State correctional facility several miles past the outskirts of Phoenix,” Joshi answered. “We believe the prison break was staged by our Golden Ratio Killer, considering the crime scene photos we received.” Joshi’s next pause was deliberate, measured, before he added, “We think he may have been an inmate.”

  Malcolm caught his breath, while Seong-Jae’s head snapped toward Joshi. “So the reason he became dormant was because he was incarcerated?”

  “That’s the standing theory,” Joshi answered.

  “Then we know his identity?” Seong-Jae countered.

  “No.” Joshi shook his head. “That’s where it gets…complicated.”

  With a frown, Malcolm shifted more to face them both, drawing one knee up on the seat and stretching his arm along the back. “Minimum or maximum security prison?”

  “Minimum,” Joshi said. “White collar crimes, petty larcenies, nothing that would gain a life sentence. I hear the guards called it orange jumpsuit country club.”

  “That’s…hm.” Malcolm ran his fingers through his beard, then bit at the knuckle of his thumb. “That’s strange. That he’d follow patterns so precisely and evade capture for years, but end up caught and incarcerated for a minor crime.”

  “Not so very minor,” Seong-Jae said. “He has been dormant since two thousand and one. Which means he earned a sentence of at least fifteen to twenty years.”

  “Repeat offender?” Malcolm asked.

  “Possibly,” Joshi confirmed, then paused. Trouble darkened his brow, trouble and a confusion that seemed out of place in a man of such age and experience, which said more than anything for just how far off the beaten path this case must be. “The question is…for what?”

  [5: EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE]

  SEONG-JAE STARED PAST MALCOLM, out the window of the SUV, as the city of Phoenix blended from high-rise downtown buildings into sprawling suburbs, then spotty residential neighborhoods, then nothing but scrub brush and rolling red-gold earth and highway flanked by billboards and advertisements.

  This felt too familiar.

  He did not like it.

  And if Aanga were not watching, he might well hide himself against Malcolm so that he could pretend this was not happening, until the very last moment when he was forced to confront the specter of death the murderer had left behind.

  I do not want this.

  He could already feel it creeping over him.

  The black. The dark. The whisper that belonged not to the shadow of heroin that still, after all these years, lived in his veins…

  …but to the sickness that seemed as though it had lived inside his mind for his entire life.

  The thing that let him project himself into the minds of the worst murderers, psychopaths, serial killers.

  And understand them with a depth so intense that sometimes he could feel it.

  The rictus of his teeth, clenched and hungry.

  The craving for the sensation of blood running over his fingertips.

  A driving need so intense it bordered on lust, compulsive. He had never understood how allosexual people contextualized sexual desire as something they could not resist, something that took control until they claimed no responsibility for the actions they took in moments of frustrated arousal.

  Yet somehow…

  He could understand that moment of impetus that pushed a killer beyond the point of no return, a desire that ran deeper than the mere pleasures of the flesh.

  What is wrong with me?

  He had asked himself that so many times—curled up in his bed in his Los Angeles apartment, sleepless, cigarette hanging from his shaking fingers, staring into the dark, the taste of his own tears on his lips.

  What is wrong with me? What is wrong with me? What is wrong with me?

  Whispered again and again and again, until he had finally left simply to make that question stop. To silence that voice.

  But now it was awake again.

  Awake, and hissing soft things into his ear about just how to slice a body neatly, so neatly, once it had been drained of blood so that it would not drip at all.

  The correctional facility began as a gray smudge on the horizon, hazed and distant against the yellow reflections off pervasive clouds of dust—before resolving into a long, low collection of blocky concrete buildings, featureless, surrounded by multiple layers of perimeter fencing topped in loops of barbed wire. Guard turrets perched at each corner; the open paved outdoor recreational areas stood empty, benches vacant, a single forgotten basketball resting on the court and throwing back the midday light from its gleaming pebbled curve.

  Seong-Jae might almost think the facility entirely empty.

  If not for the fact that police cars and black unmarked vehicles with blackout windows were parked around all sides, piled two and three deep until some had to be left off the road and parked in the flat scree and dusty gravel all around.

  Fuck.

  This was going to be bad.

  Malcolm shifted at his side with a growling sound, rolling tensely off his lips. “…be straight with me, Joshi. How many dead are we looking at?”

  “Thirty-three,” Aanga answered, low and slow—and gone was that quiet sense of sardonic, self-deprecating mockery, replaced by gravity, even…sorrow, something in the hitch of his voice whispering that his position had not desensitized him just yet; that the man Seong-Jae knew was still beneath the defensive sarcasm. “One and one, two…”

  “…three, five, eight, thirteen,” Seong-Jae finished softly. “It would seem he wanted to make a statement.”

  “And an entire facility full of people who couldn’t run would make it very easy.” Malcolm closed his eyes, deep seam
s appearing in his brow, before he dragged a hand over his face and ended with his fingers tangled in his beard. “What else do I need to be warned about before going in?”

  Aanga shook his head. “I’d rather not. If you’re as useful as Seong-Jae says you are, I want you unbiased by whatever I might say. Fresh eyes may be just what we need.”

  “I think I’m already biased.” Malcolm snorted bitterly. “If the prior crime scene photos aren’t enough to make me hate this fucker…”

  “It’s not about how you feel about him,” Aanga pointed out. “It’s that Seong-Jae and I are both familiar with his methods from staged kills. This isn’t a staged kill. This is a prison break that he used as an opportunity to implement his pattern again. It’s a wholly new scenario, and I want you to tell me what you see without my influence before I tell you what I know. Seong-Jae and I are both FBI trained. You’re not. Your different training may give us the insight we need to get this done before he can cause any more harm.” He adjusted his glasses, turning his nose up with a touch of clear pride in the stiffness of his shoulders, the precision of his voice. “That is why I approved your clearance, Malcolm Khalaji. Not because Seong-Jae asked and your captain decided to be…difficult.”

  Seong-Jae stared at Aanga.

  And for a moment Aanga caught his eye, smiling faintly, sadly, before looking away and fixing his gaze pointedly out the window.

  While Seong-Jae let his hand fall to the rough fingers that had been curled against his thigh the entire drive, and slipped his palm against Malcolm’s to squeeze tight.

  The driver parked the SUV as close to the prison gates as they could get. Considering the desolate emptiness outside, Seong-Jae imagined the interior of the prison would be swarming.

  He was not incorrect.

  A short walk through an only slightly chilly day, a far cry from Baltimore’s snow, and a quick badge flash to pass a phalanx of guards…

  And they stepped into chaos, pure and unrelenting.